Large High Schools in the City Are Taking Hard Falls

Students from Christopher Columbus High School and Global Enterprise Academy marched to protest the scheduled closing of their schools.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

The boos cascaded over the auditorium as a city education official read out the case against Christopher Columbus High School, one of the last remaining large high schools in the Bronx.

Columbus has had a “long history of sustained academic failure” and “chronically poor performance and low demand,” Santiago Taveras, a deputy chancellor, told the standing-room crowd. As a result, he said, it should be closed.

But the frustrated teachers, soft-spoken students and former football players who stood up at the hearing said otherwise. They described a school that had served some students well, despite the difficult circumstances faced by many. They told of a school that, even after the city identified it as struggling, continued to receive an increasing share of the city’s most demanding students — the very students that needed the most help.

“And now that they have found a home here, and have been welcomed with open arms to our family, you want to take that away from them, too,” said Jaime Allen, a special education teacher.

Closing schools for poor performance, especially large high schools, has been one of the most controversial hallmarks of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s control of the school system. And it is taking on a new urgency, both in New York and around the country, with the Obama administration putting a premium on “school turnaround” policies in its nationwide competition, called Race to the Top, for billions of dollars in federal education grants.

Since 2002, the city has closed or is in the process of closing 91 schools, replacing them with smaller schools and charter schools, often several in the same building, with new leadership and teachers. This year, the city has proposed phasing out 20 schools, the most in any year. It is also the first year in which the city is required to hold public hearings at each school proposed for closing, as a result of a change in the mayoral control law that resulted from complaints about an insufficient role for parents.

The hearings are unlikely to save any school from closing; on Tuesday, a panel controlled by mayoral appointees will vote on the proposals. But in auditorium after auditorium at schools on the closing list, like Columbus, Jamaica and Beach Channel High Schools in Queens, and William H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn, the hearings have exposed a torrent of anger about how large high schools have fared in the Bloomberg years.

The city’s Education Department says that on the whole, the closings have been a success. The small high schools created in the shells of old large high schools have average graduation rates of 75 percent, 15 percent higher than in the city as a whole and far greater than those of the schools they replaced.

“Obviously, closing schools is not something anyone enjoys,” said Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor. “By and large, what this is about is simply the fact that when you have many kids in a high-needs community, you find that the smaller schools, where they are highly personalized, where they have strong partnerships and involvement with various organizations, those things really have been a successful strategy for us.”

To education officials, the failures of Columbus, a 70-year-old school that graduated only 40 percent of its students on time last year and received a D on its most recent report card, are self-evident. And they say they make the closing process as painless as possible. For the closing school, it is a gradual death, with current students allowed to graduate if they do not fall behind, but no new classes admitted. As space opens up, the new schools come to life, adding a grade each year.

A study last year by the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School backed the chancellor’s argument that students at the smaller schools — which are organized around themes like science or community service — fare better. But the study also found evidence of a domino effect at the large high schools.

Because the new schools, at first, accepted relatively few special education and non-English-speaking students, those students began enrolling in greater numbers in the remaining large high schools. Overall enrollment increased at many large high schools, and attendance fell. “While a few schools were successful in absorbing such students, most were not,” the report said.

Photo

Lisa Fuentes is principal of Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, one of the schools that may be closed. A poster beside her invited students to a rally held to protest the planned closing.Credit
Ruby Washington/The New York Times

From the classrooms of Columbus, the last seven years have felt like forging ahead though a snowstorm, said Karen Sherwood, an English teacher since 1993. In 2003, for example, its honors programs were peeled off and became separate small schools in its large brick building on Astor Avenue in the Pelham Parkway neighborhood. Three other small schools moved in. (One is now on the city’s closing list for poor performance.) The result was severe overcrowding for Columbus’s 3,400 students, who had classes on the auditorium stage and attended in split shifts between 7 a.m. and 5:45 p.m.

As the Department of Education sent fewer students to Columbus, enrollment began to decline, but so did the academic level of its entering student body. By 2005, only 6 percent of the entering eighth graders were reading at grade level, and the proportion of special education students rose to nearly a quarter. Another reorganization led the school to create small clusters with names like “Equality” and “Justice,” and to form work-study and other structured programs that give students on the verge of dropping out a second chance.

The school stabilized, but its four-year graduation rate remained stubbornly low, and struggles continued. As measured by the city’s “peer index,” which takes into account over-age and special education students and the academic level of its entering class, Columbus had the eighth-lowest ranking among 380 high schools in 2008-9.

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The Columbus student body is in constant flux. Because the school has unscreened admissions, it takes children expelled from charter schools, released from juvenile detention, and others on a near-daily basis: last year, 359 of its 1,400 students arrived between October and June. Even after the city proposed the school’s closing in December, it received 27 more students. Lisa Fuentes, the Columbus principal since 2002, said she believed that her school was succeeding, considering its challenges. Her feeling is that city wants the space her school occupies, for small schools and charters.

“It’s something that they are going to do just to fulfill their next plan,” Ms. Fuentes said, speaking in a low, calm tone on the day before the school hearing.

The city does not dispute that Columbus has been dealt a tough hand, but it argues that other high schools with a similar population — 26 percent are classified as special education and 18 percent are not fluent in English — have had better results. Columbus was also included on New York State’s list of “persistently lowest performing” schools last week, which requires the city to produce a plan either for closing or for staff changes and reorganization of the school.

“I’m not going to say it is not a challenging situation; it is,” said John White, the deputy chancellor for strategy. “We are not laying the blame for the challenges at the feet of anyone in particular. The question, is can you organize a school in different ways for greater success, and we have shown that we can.”

In November, the mayor said his goal was to shut down the lowest-performing 10 percent of city schools over the next four years, doubling down on Washington’s challenge to states to close or turn around the weakest 5 percent of schools. States get credit for effective turnaround strategies in their applications for $4 billion in Race to the Top funds, which were submitted last Tuesday. An additional $3.5 billion will go to states this spring to finance school transformations or closures.

In Chicago, school officials closed 44 schools between 2001 and 2006 more abruptly than New York did: instead of phasing out schools by grade, the entire student body was dispersed at once. When the schools reopened the next year, there were new administrators, teachers and students.

But the displaced students often went into other weak schools, adding little benefit for those students and sending those schools into tailspins. As chief executive officer of the Chicago public schools during that era, Arne Duncan, now the federal secretary of education, modified the policy to follow what he calls a “turnaround model.” In most cases, students now remain in the same building, while most or all of the staff is replaced.

Mr. Duncan said the federal government did not have a preference for closing over other school-overhaul models. Race to the Top suggests a number of options, such as replacing the principal and having the staff reapply for their jobs, or converting a public school to charter management.

“What might work in one school might not work in a school two miles away,” he said. “This is complicated, and it really has to be done by a case-by-case basis. There’s no magic bullet.”

Mr. Klein’s view is that large high schools are a poor setup for children who need special attention. And if a school is not organized properly for its population, it is likely to fail. As such, the closing proposals are “curative, not punitive,” he said. But that is not what the closing schools want to hear.

“We’ll be O.K.; it’s just very upsetting,” said Ms. Fuentes, the Columbus principal. “I’m proud of my staff, even with my D. We worked very hard for that D.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 26, 2010, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: Big Schools Fall Hard In City Plan. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe